


I'm still lookin' for them eyes, to meet me at the end of the line

by likewinning



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Awesome Ladies Ficathon, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-22
Updated: 2010-06-22
Packaged: 2018-01-26 01:20:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1669451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likewinning/pseuds/likewinning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the <a href="http://ineffort.livejournal.com/199061.html">Awesome Ladies Ficathon</a>. Prompt: <i>Jo/Dean. nine times.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm still lookin' for them eyes, to meet me at the end of the line

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Magnolia Electric Co.

**one.** _it wouldn’t be the first time that I made a mistake in my life._

John introduces them, says, "This is my son, Dean." John squeezes his shoulder, and Dean isn't sure whether it's to say _be good_ or _be careful_.

Either way, he doesn't listen. Dean's nineteen and Jo's just shy of sixteen, all long legs and cut-offs and a pretty scowl that probably matches her mama's back in the day. It's the middle of September and hot as hell and Dean spends the next two hours while his dad and Ellen talk shop staring at the trickles of sweat that make their way from the nape of Jo's neck down her back.

"What're you starin' at?" she asks him about seven different times, and every time he grunts and says nothing because she's a _kid_ , Sam's age, but Sam's got the collected works of fuck-knows-who and he's curled up outside somewhere pretending girls still have cooties.

Which Dean knows damn well he doesn't think anymore, but it makes no difference because as soon as John and Ellen head out back to find some rare amulet or other, Jo stops glaring at him, slides up to him by the bar and asks if he really killed a werewolf once.

Dean grins, tells her, _yeah, maybe._

Jo doesn't ask him to go steady, doesn't take him in the back somewhere and blow him, but she kicks his ass at the shooting game and kisses him quick near the jukebox, tasting like cherry chapstick and stolen cigarettes.

Before he and John and Sam leave, Dean calls her a sweet kid. Next time he sees her, she pretends not to recognize him.

-

**two.** _foot by foot, I feel like I’m being cast off._

 

It's supposed to be ten states in ten days, but the beat up Chevy he hotwires in Iowa only takes him one state over before it craps out in the middle of the highway. He thinks once about calling his dad, twice about calling Sam, but in the end he ditches the car and hitchhikes to the Roadhouse, inhaling enough dust along the way to have him coughing for hours afterward.

Jo and Ellen both laugh until they're sick, taking in the engine grease on Dean's hands and the dirt on his clothes, John Winchester's kid, beaten by a goddamn car, but they get him some water and clean clothes, and Ellen sets him up on a spare mattress for the night while he figures out what to do next.

She comes to see him later, Jo does, offering a beer and a sandwich, and Dean's half tempted to make Hooter's jokes until she says, quiet enough that even Ellen's supersonic hearing wouldn't pick it up, "So, ten states in ten days, huh?"

"That was the idea," Dean agrees, reaching for the sandwich.

Jo holds it out of his grip. "You should take me with you," she says, and Dean stares at her for a while, like he's waiting for the punchline.

"No," he says when there isn't one, then, "Do I look like I got a deathwish?"

"Startin' to," Jo says with a look that's so similar to her mother's, Dean's damn near uncomfortable with it. That kind of bitter look doesn't belong on a girl as young as Jo is, he knows that much.

He drops his gaze, and Jo drops down onto the mattress next to him with a huff of breath, finally handing over his sandwich, but she keeps the beer long enough to take a swig. "I've never been anywhere," she admits.

"You're not missin' so much," Dean says, and in a way, it's true. Most towns look the same after a while, which is why Dean was going to hit the good ones - before fuckin' Nebraska, anyway.

He looks over at Jo again, though, and she's smiling a little, like what he's saying brings any kind of comfort. For a minute, he thinks maybe ten days here wouldn't be so bad.

But he's sure as hell not taking her with once he’s on his feet again. She'd cramp his style.

-

**three.** _it is the year that catches you, putting the shake on your words._

 

Dean calls. She's seven states away by the time he does, new job and a haircut and three different fake IDs away, but he calls.

She nearly drops the phone.

Her hands shake and her voice feels rusty, like she doesn't make small talk with everyone at the bar who looks like a decent tipper, like she doesn't have four different accents lined up for widows and insurance agents and law enforcement.

She asks, "Hello?" and all her nerves seem justified when she hears that quiet chuckle, hears _Dean_ , really Dean.

"Didn't think you'd pick up," he says at last, and there's noise in the background, the tail end of Zep’s _Houses of the Holy_ , but she can feel that Sam isn't with him.

"Trust me," she says, but there's a smile on her lips and if he was standing in front of her there'd be a twinkle in her eye, the kind she can’t stop no matter how she trains herself not to care, "I'm reconsidering it."

"Yeah," Dean says, and she hears him breathe in-out, can't fight the way her pulse speeds up even though he could be anywhere, next door or thousands of miles away, even though according to some demon he doesn't even _think of her_ -

"Why'd you call?" she asks, getting to the point, and it's a good choice on her part because she hears his breath catch at that.

"I," Dean says. "We were -" and then there's a longer pause, and the music in the background gets quieter, and Dean says real quick, like a shot, "I just wanted to see if you're okay. How you're... holdin' up."

Jo doesn't laugh, but it's a near miss. Her hands don't shake anymore, but she's still grinning.

"Fine," she says, mostly meaning it. There's another pause, a few second's decision, and then she says, "I'm in Dallas, you ever want to look me up."

"Yeah, Jo. We - I just might."

“No, you won’t,” she says to the dial tone, and this time, she’s right.

-

**four.** _bread can feed a few, so can some cartoons._

The devil's gate opens, and Sam Winchester dies, and everything falls apart for a while - not exactly in that order.

Point of it is, Sam dies and Dean doesn't. Dean walks around like someone tore a hole in his soul, like someone split him down the middle and put him back together wrong, all jagged edges and split seams. Jo's heart aches like it hasn't since her dad left and never came back.

For a while, Dean doesn't even talk. She sees him now and again, different jobs, different bars. He shows up with dirt under his nails, smelling like whiskey and blood and sulfur, gun set straight on the bar like a warning or a promise. He doesn't say more than hello to her, but she catches him sometimes. Watching her. He could’ve come in, noticed her behind the bar and walked out, but he never does.

It's three months before she lets it happen. She's in Wyoming, pulling another bar gig after what looked like a werewolf hunt fell through (sometimes, monsters are just people), and Dean shows up and bleeds all over her counter before she can close up shop and get him in back.

"Idiot," she says, "the fuck were you thinkin', goin' after something like that alone?" And it's only then, when Dean starts laughing, loud and hoarse and choking with it, that Jo realizes how long it's been since she said a word to him, either.

She takes him home that night, pushes him back on cheap motel sheets and keeps an eye out for his stitches even while they kiss hard and fast and sloppy. He smells like sweat and cheap cologne and gasoline, speaks only in grunts except to say her name, twice, quiet, and he digs his hands into her sides like if he doesn’t, she’ll disappear quick as a ghost.

In the morning the circles under his eyes are a little lighter, and she makes him coffee and lets him take her favorite thermos on the road with him, the one with Ash’s initials in blue Sharpie on the bottom. She calls him twice a week, every week after that. Sometimes he doesn't answer, sometimes he talks until his voice goes hoarse, but it's something.

The world ticks on, and so does Dean, somehow.

-

**five.** _they carry news that must get through._

It’s a week before Bobby calls, Dean long-buried and Sam gone to fuck knows where. When Bobby tells her, Jo breathes a sigh of relief before she can start to grieve properly, because she’s spent the week in Amherst thinking something was wrong, that something was off – not the hunt, which didn’t take more than a couple bites out of her left shoulder, nor the pool hall, where she made off with five hundred bucks -, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

The first thing she remembers is the feel of her fist hitting his face, how she went in the back to clean the blood off her hands and laughed for a minute, thinking _I just slugged a Winchester_. Those invulnerable boys with a history older than Jo herself, and Jo took one out.

And if she could, well, why not some hellhounds.

Bobby’s talking in her ear, about demons and deals and some thief she’s never heard of, but it’s just a buzz in her ear while she remembers Dean, his hands in her hair and his mouth on her neck and the wall at some bar in Tallahassee pressing into her back. She remembers his eyes, bright and drunk and desperate, and how she should’ve known right there that for Dean, this was it. Not the right time, not the right place, but the only chance he had. One year to tie up every loose end.

She should’ve known, and her hand shakes while she writes down the directions Bobby gives her to where Dean’s buried, like she’ll actually ever go. Like she’ll put flowers on his grave and cry and talk to him like he can hear a damn word. She’s her mother’s daughter, and she knows just what she’ll do.

She hangs up, heads out and buys a bottle of whiskey and a pack of smokes. She tells herself Dean got himself into this mess and she doesn’t care.

For a while there, 3AM and dizzy with drink, she believes it.

-

**six.** _when your feet are back on the solid ground._

Dean's been out of hell for two months when she calls, unknown number with a Chicago area code. Her voice blares out so loud Sam jumps from his spot in the passenger seat, and Dean holds the phone away from his ear and lets her yell.

"You could've fuckin' told me," she finishes. "Sent a goddamn text message, Dean Winchester. Jesus."

"Sorry," Dean says, knowing it's not enough. He looks at Sam and Sam makes a _hey, beats me_ face at him, which does him no good. "Sam says next time we'll send out mass texts," he says, and now Sam's glaring at him.

Everyone's against Dean, basically.

Jo shows up four days later when they're working an angry spirit thing in Minnesota, marches straight into their hotel room like she owns it, winds up and slugs Dean before either he or Sam can get in a word.

Dean's too busy rubbing his jaw so Sam supplies the, "Hi, Jo," and they go from there.

They tell her about getting out of hell, about angels and the apocalypse. They buy her a few beers each and she laughs and sucks them down and Dean doesn't know if it's hell, if it's two years time, if it's him or her or both of them, but he thinks he didn't know what he was missing, before. He gives Sam a look over Jo's shoulder and Sam rolls his eyes like _yeah, whatever, fine_ , but Jo cuts herself off from a story about chupacabra down in Santa Fe to say, "You think you're getting anywhere near my pants tonight, Dean Winchester, Hell made you even dumber than you were before."

Sam laughs until he chokes, and Jo offers him a napkin and a pat on the back before she turns back to Dean, smiling sweet as pie. "You call me when you get yourself out of this mess, Dean. I'll be around."

-

**seven.** _if you’re born a lion, don’t bother trying to act tame._

After her mom dies – cancer, of course; Jo knew it when she was six and she’d steal Ellen’s cigarettes and throw them out, and she knew it as soon as she got the call from Bobby –, Jo settles down in Montana to wait out the rest of her time. For a while, she plays house: a dog and a swing set, clean windows and a little garden when she can convince the ground to grow more than weeds. But just like she always knew, she gets restless, can’t sleep more than two hours a night still and makes pots of coffee ‘round the clock.

It’s stupid, her house and her fake name and her neighbors, but after surviving the damn apocalypse, she thought it was what she wanted, what her mom would’ve wanted for her. Dean had taken her hand, after, blood covering them and Sam, scratches and bruises and gun powder for miles, pulled her off in the distance. She was quiet, for once, too beat to hell to think about making a joke, and Dean seemed about the same, staring down at her like to tell her he had some bad news.

She’d heard all the bad news there was, already.

Dean asked, “So what are you gonna do?”

And for the first time in Jo’s life, she didn’t know. She didn’t have a plan, a _where to_. She didn’t want to have either of those things. She never thought they’d live through it; it was partly why she’d taken Dean up on his stupid _last night on earth_ offer (that, and the way his stupid smile still made her feel all of fifteen, heart-fluttering knee-knocking fifteen and foolish and _wanting_ ). And they had, and Dean was looking at her like he really wanted to know, like when she told Dean about her dad and he stopped looking at her like some cute kid playing with fire (which she was, she knows now) and saw _her_.

“Head north,” is what she said, swallowing every impulse to say, _I don’t know, you got any ideas_? Like some kind of pickup line. Dean left it at that, walked her back to the car and opened and shut his mouth a few times before saying, “I’ll see you, okay?”

She dropped his hand, letting go of calluses and dried blood and warmth she’d been wanting for years and said, “Yeah, Dean. Sure you will.”

In Montana, the grass goes wild around the rundown house she rents with years’ worth of poker money, the swing set creaks with every movement, and the stray she takes in howls like death every Sunday, and she can’t sleep and everything’s stained with coffee rings, but she’s twenty-four and grown, past needing anyone to hold her hand (she thinks, she thinks), and when Dean calls, she doesn’t pick up.

-

**eight.** _what we made doesn’t make sense._

Jo’s the first person Dean calls when Sam says yes. Not Bobby, not Ellen, not any of the dozens of hunters he could think to call, just Jo. He wakes her up at 4AM and she curses him out for five minutes before he can get a word in, and his chest still feels hollow but it’s something.

“We’ll figure somethin’ out,” she says eventually, 5:30 and they’re each drinking their respective beers on opposite ends of the phone. It’s the first time Dean can remember Jo ever lying to him.

She shows up at Bobby’s four days later, and Ellen comes along for the ride. They plan and they talk until their voices run dry and all the while, the world’s ending around them. The Croatoan virus runs through Michigan first, wipes out the state quick as chalk on a chalkboard, and Dean’s half-tempted to take a marker to the map on Bobby’s wall and blacken the whole thing out. _Gone_ , like that.

“Don’t be a jackass,” Jo says, from her spot on the floor. There’s a rifle by her feet and her knife’s close by, and she’s flipping through the same ancient book they’ve all gone through before, like it takes a certain touch to find the right answers. “We’ll get him back, or we’ll kill him. Quit bein’ a princess and do your job.”

Anger flares quick, at the words and at that helpful reminder that the job he’s been doing since he was four years old is gone, pulled out from under him. But she smirks at him and he remembers the bruises on her hips, the scratches on his back, the way any time she brings him coffee she’ll shove it at him quick, just enough to spill over the cup and get his hand.

They aren’t going to win, and they aren’t going to get Sam back. Sam’s dead, just like they’ll all be soon. Dean knows that much, would even if the pit in his stomach and common fucking sense didn’t tell him every hour. But he sits down next to Jo anyway, takes the book from her and says, “Get some sleep. You got enough bags under your eyes already.” She socks him twice in the arm and drops the book in his lap hard, but she’s smiling when she stands up.

They won’t win, but they haven’t lost yet – not completely.

-

**nine.** _we’re either greeted by life or its reverse._

Heaven isn’t hunting, and it isn’t her family, either. It’s not a house in a suburbs and it’s not a penthouse. It’s a bar, nondescript and clean, pool table and a big couch in back for her to rest her head when she needs it. People trickle in and out, some she knows and some she’s never seen before, dead hunters and dead family men, dead actresses. She pours their drinks and listens to their stories and she wonders at the way it works, that this could be heaven for her, but she can’t argue with what she has.

There’s peace.

Dean stops in, sometimes. He and Sam die more than Jo knows what to do with, anymore, and each time he shows up he’s forgotten the time before. She’d hate it, that need to explain herself twenty times and Dean’s same jokes at the expense of REO, if every time – without fail, no matter how he or Sam dies, no matter what else is going on back there – his face didn’t light up just _so_ at the sight of her.

She still gives him hell, still kicks his ass at poker and threatens his life if he changes the song one more time, still serves him more water than whiskey until he comes behind the counter and grabs the bottle himself, sliding his hand up her waist as he does, but for twenty minutes, everything’s close to perfect. It’s heaven, after all.

She holds her breath every time he apologizes for getting her killed, shakes her head the same way. Offers him some form of forgiveness for all the thousand things he seems to think he’s done wrong.

When he leaves – and he always does, same sad smile that lights up his eyes and makes them crinkle around the edges –, she doesn’t kiss him goodbye like they’re at the tail end of a war movie, even though they sort of are. She doesn’t say anything bitter, the way her mom used to say to her dad. She just smiles back with an ease she’s only gained since heaven and says, “No, Dean, you better not see me soon. Watch your fuckin’ back this time.”

He laughs, and the sound echoes for minutes after he leaves.

-


End file.
